Sara Bareilles (‘Girls5eva’) on Dawn’s ‘beautiful’ epiphany and the virtues of medium time [Exclusive Video Interview]
Season 3 of “Girls5eva” finds the titular girl group hitting the road on a self-funded tour, driving around the U.S. in a van. It’s not too dissimilar from the early days of Sara Bareilles‘ music career when she toured the country as the opening act for Mika in 2007. “We could not afford flights, so we were driving and we were basically not sleeping,” she tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “It was my band and I literally changing drivers mid-highway and just rotate. We would just stop to get gas. That was all we had time for. We left after our show in San Francisco and drove straight through the night for two days to get to Chicago for the next sound check. But honestly, it’s some of the most joyful memories I have even though they were completely chaotic and sort of terrifying.”
That duality of nostalgia is something Dawn (Bareilles) reckons with in the third season. The practical one of the quartet, she has an epiphany in the fourth episode, “Orlando,” in which Girls5eva is hired to perform at the birthday party (theme: My Posters Come to Life) of one of their longtime fans, Taffy (Cat Cohen), who is now married to a rich old dude. Dawn thinks their old problematic songs, like “Sweet ‘N Low Daddy,” corrupted Taffy and apologizes. But Taffy schools Dawn on nostalgia, telling her that Girls5eva’s songs just take her back to a simpler time, and calls out Dawn for liking nostalgia too as she’s chasing the high of Girls5eva’s Y2K success.
“Everything is gray matter, in between what we think of as black and white. I feel that way too. There are some problematic things that still somehow bring me comfort from the past, but it’s just because it does elicit these memories of being of a certain age, your life was less complicated or you sort of had that optimistic naïveté. You just didn’t know as much as you know now. Once you see things, it’s hard to unsee them. It’s a bittersweet reminder,” Bareilles says. “I think she really is in conflict around that. I think she has kind of grown up enough to see how used and abused they were. But at the same time, that sense of, what if you put all of that down for a minute and just enjoy running around stage and singing in front of people who are singing the music back to you? There’s something so simple and beautiful about that. I think it’s both. I think that she can recognize that this is complicated and I love it. And that’s OK.”
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Dawn sheds her shame shackles and performs “Sweet’N Low Daddy,” allowing herself, for once, to acknowledge that she likes and wants something. “I think that’s one of the things that seems to be so present for [creator] Meredith [Scardino] in general. It’s fun to see women in their 40s and 50s who are not on the sideline and are not feeling the need to be settled in some way but actually asking the questions of what do I want? Am I willing to try and go and create for myself? I think those are great questions to ask,” Bareilles adds.
What Girls5eva wants — besides selling tickets for their Radio Music Hall concert — is to hit the big time again and sustain it. But just like how conversations around pop culture change over time, so too do dreams. In the finale, as Dawn seeks a famous person to help sell tickets, she bumps into Richard Kind, who advises she seek the medium time: Don’t chase the highest of highs, but rather be happy and grateful for where you are. “Never above No. 5 on the call sheet of life,” he states. That inspires Dawn to write “The Medium Time,” the closing number to their show. The heartfelt piano ballad was written by Bareilles, who has penned Girls5eva tunes for each season finale (“4 Stars” in Season 1 and “Bend Not Break” in Season 2). When she first took a stab at “The Medium Time,” she called Scardino up with a concern.
“I started writing this song and I was like, ‘I think it might not be funny. It doesn’t feel like a very funny moment to me to sing about this idea of just, like, being in the middle. It actually feels sort of sweet and compassionate,'” the Grammy winner recalls. “And she was like, ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that. Then it’s not funny.’ What a gift to get to work on a show that makes so much space for, yes, hard comedy and just straight-up just jokes on jokes on jokes but then also have some room for heart and sincerity. We were emotional around the piano shooting that scene because it’s also been the journey of this show.”
“Girls5eva” moved to Netflix after two seasons on Peacock. While there’s no word yet on a fourth season, the Season 3 finale does set the group up to possibly experience some true success as it ends with them about to accept an offer to contribute to the female Garfield movie soundtrack. And Bareilles would like to see them hit the big time — just for a little bit. “I think it would be fun to see the girls deal with a modicum of success and see what that looks like,” she says. “I really love this sweet spot of where the women are multifaceted. They are dealing with their career and their lives, like most people are demanding and asking for their attention, and there’s a lot of juggling that happens. It’s just very relatable.”
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